February 6, 2024

Using AI to Learn Bash shell scripting

January was a busy and interesting month. I spent a fair bit of time working with AI as my mentor/tutor to dig deeper into Bash shell scripting. I haven’t used AI for mentoring before and it was a pretty fun experience. Bash is incredibly powerful, and you can combine it with Keyboard Maestro to create some powerful applets. It’s easy to make a UI in Keyboard Maestro to populate values, then call a shell script to accomplish some really impressive tasks. To get the ball rolling, I started off asking for tutorials on different aspects of Bash scripting, such as “Can you give me a tutorial on Strings in Bash scripting.” That would produce a short lesson on Strings with a few examples. It gave me the basic usage, which was perfect. In those simple examples, it also provided some other topics I could look up. Then, I moved on to practical examples of where and how to use various […]

October 26, 2023

Getting life back in order with TaskPaper and 2Do. Write down the simple stuff.

I’m not sure when or why, but at some point I let my 2Do list become obsolete. Things got worse when I put TaskPaper away for reasons I don’t have an excuse for. This was the start of my downfall. With a lot of things going on, and a slew of distractions, I’m easily taken off course for the day and the week. Things I plan to do, I forget, or I don’t do them when I should, and other tasks fall behind. While handling a task, I realize I need to take care of a related task over the weekend. The weekend comes, I forget what that task was because I didn’t write it down. I think working on Windows has made my brain soft. In reality, it’s a couple of issues related to the neighbor and his miserable dogs. All those distractions take me off course and I’m not taking care of my business. Simple fix, 2Do and […]

October 22, 2023

Recording streaming audio with Piezo

There are tools to download audio and video. There are tools for converting between formats. And there are tools for splitting and joining files. So, what’s the correct tool for capturing audio when you can’t download it? While there are several tools to handle the job such as QuickTime and Audacity, if you want the quick click option, Piezo by Rogue Amoeba is the best choice. Piezo is capable of capturing system audio generated from a specific device or application. For example, you can capture audio from Safari and Firefox independently. This avoid system dings and notifications. Or you can capture from another application such as Teams, Discord, or Slack. That last one needs permission from the participants, let’s not overlook that. But, there are plenty of Live streams on YouTube where the music plays in a loop, and the stream has been running for several days. With Piezo, it’s possible to capture that audio so you can listen to […]

October 19, 2023

Merge, Join, Stitch together video and audio with Permute and Focus Video

Easy Record and Trim can split an audio file, and Video Cut, Crop and Join can split a video file, but what’s the tool for merging files back together? Even though Video Cut, Crop and Join has “Join” in the name, and it can indeed join or merge videos together, it’s not an intuitive process. It can be done by adding files to the task queue, even though you aren’t processing them, selecting the files in Task List, then right click and select Merge Videos. Give it a few minutes and the job will be done, even though it doesn’t look like anything is happening. The process isn’t intuitive, it duplicates files and uses up space, and the output progress window is basically non-existent. Disappointing to be sure, but there are alternatives for this job. If you have Permute for converting and extracting audio and video, you already have a tool for merging video and audio, it just may not […]

October 10, 2023

Working with videos using Fast Video Browser

Another tool in the DummyApps lineup is Fast Video Browser, which as the name implies, is a fast view browser. This is a tool I use on a regular basis to help me find videos, remember what a video is about so I give it a better name, help search for duplicates, and delete videos I no longer need. Fast Video Browser has a couple of features that make it more efficient and capable than more expensive video catalog tools. Fast Video Browser is an easy, but powerful way of going through a series of videos. Do you have multiple resolutions? Is the video out of date? Can you delete it to save space? Is the entire video playable? Fast Video Browser is great for reviewing files on an external drive, or in archive folders. It’s great for comparing files, such as which is the trimmed video file and which is the completed one? I use this all the time […]

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